


drinking up the sunshine

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gratuitous Eating of Fruit, I think this one's mostly Scenery Porn if I'm being honest, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 17:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7766092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He gets called out as a thief anyway, a rude “Oi,” hurtled across the field, followed by a boy about his age and about his size and still somehow a thousand times larger. He strides across the field with all the confidence that belonging bestows, and everything in his glare makes Adam feel like an outsider, an invader, a stranger dredging dust and unwanted heartache along with him.</p><p>Pynch Week Day One // Alternate Meetings</p>
            </blockquote>





	drinking up the sunshine

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre-canon when they're both ~15 (technically since we don’t know how they met literally anything could be an ‘alternate’ meeting but w/e, let’s go)
> 
> Thanks to my lovely wife [telekinesiskid](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/) for beta reading, she had to pause a video game to do it, 10/10 quality partner.

The edges of Henrietta are their own special kind of wasteland, dust and dirt in a place that should be painted Virginia green. As soon as the shops and suburbs are out of sight, they are a world away, pushed as forcibly from the imagination as everything else. Adam knows where the true borders are and he skirts them, head bowed against the sun, following the furthest road that could be considered part of Henrietta but not drifting any further.

He blames the factory for moving his shift and leaving him at home in the middle of the day, and his father blamed him for the spike in the electric bill, and bitterness sits in his chest as sick and hot as the air around. It feels like the walls are closing in; fifteen with no exit in sight, fifteen with the rest of his life mapped out as a single straight line. The three years until his escape feels like three years that he will not survive.

The next crossroads coincides with a surge of frustration so strong Adam thinks he might choke on it, and then he’s finally walking away, away, with fists clenched so tight that it hurts. Just a taste, he tells himself, just a few hours out of Henrietta, just a break. No one will miss him. No one will wonder where he’s gone until there’s work to be done or bills to be paid, and until then the sun can catch his shadow and throw it as far as it can down the road ahead of him.  

There are less hubcaps against the side of the road, the further Adam gets from Henrietta. Less fast food garbage, less scrabbly grass, more real plants, bristling with aggressive survival at the roadside. The air gets easier to breathe, and the heat is less cloying, more cleansing. Adam can feel sweat trickling down the back of his neck, slowly pulling his tension away with it.

He’s not moving in any particular direction because he’s not trying to get anywhere. Periodically, Adam tells himself that he should turn around, that any distance forwards he moves is distance he’s going to have to cover in reverse. But reluctance tugs at him every time, too hard to resist. The world is heat and insect hums, and the bottom of his pants are caked in dust, and just for a while that’s how he wants the world to stay.

It starts getting lush eventually, and Adam stops picking intersections at random, starts picking whichever path leads into deeper, brighter greenery. It feels like a break from reality when Adam leaves the road for a little path winding through the trees, and there is no silencing the voice in his head warning him about getting lost and about getting home, but they are the kind of worries he can postpone. At fifteen he has learned too many things about being stretched too thin. For now, he follows the path.

Shade sweeps over him, cooling and transformative, and the undergrowth thickens until it blends with the canopy, forms a dappled tunnel so verdant and alive that Adam is not at all surprised when it comes out in another world. It is not the kind of place that he could imagine from Henrietta; a valley, protected and private, with grazing herds to the left and an orchard ahead, everything ripe and bright and colourful. Wind shakes through a field that looks as soft as cloth and Adam aches, just a little, for a place like this. It’s not that he wants a farm; it’s the peace and the isolation and the beauty woven through every acre down to the individual roots.

The rational part of Adam that nothing can silence thinks that it is probably private property and not a fairy garden, but he proceeds anyway. The hills are studded with little buildings, but there aren’t any signs of people, and he feels like every breath is filtering out grit and engine fumes from his chest. A few lungfuls more, Adam tells himself, another promise that he’s sure to break as he wanders out to the orchard. The grass is plush underfoot, the new standard for the carpet he intends to one day own, and there is movement wherever he looks, gem-like birds nestled in the trees, deer flitting around the treeline, and fat, lazy bees. Still no people. _There should be staff, for land like this_ , the rational part of Adam thinks, and the rest of him digests the thought with a twinge of unease.

The first tree in the orchard grows plums. The others seem to grow other fruits, some too exotic for Adam to recognise, and he rustles through his limited agricultural knowledge wondering if that’s right, before giving up to admire the plums. They are the ripest, juiciest things he has ever seen, because fruit is expensive, and when it isn’t, it’s on sale and bruised and never as sweet as promised. Adam stares at the lowest hanging one, almost splitting its own skin, and thinks about how many there are and how little one would be missed.

He doesn’t take one.

He gets called out as a thief anyway, a rude “Oi,” hurtled across the field, followed by a boy about his age and about his size and still somehow a thousand times larger. He strides across the field with all the confidence that _belonging_ bestows, and everything in his glare makes Adam feel like an outsider, an invader, a stranger dredging dust and unwanted heartache along with him. “What are you doing here?”

Adam turns, keeping his arms by his side as proof he wasn’t reaching for the fruit, because he wasn’t. “Sorry,” he says, because here is mundanity rushing back in, with accusations of trespassing to muscle him back out to the part of the world he belongs to. “I didn’t take anything; I’ll go.”

The other boy’s eyes rake over him, the dirt that makes a permanent fixture on the bottom of his jeans, the sweat cooling on his brow, and then he finds the latest bruise to mar Adam’s cheek. It is a universe painted in ugly colours, unpleasant and uninviting, and the boy stares at it for a second too long. Adam wants to cover it, but doesn’t, just tilts his head away and tries to see the path he’d followed in to the farm. He can’t; the treeline is brimming, viciously vibrant, and a fierce wall for this haven.

“Did you want one?” the boy asks, pointing at the plums. Adam hesitates, hovering over a ‘no’ he doesn’t want to give, but still unable to accept. He shakes his head, and the boy shrugs and helps himself, sticky juice bursting from the fruit at the first bite and staining his lips a deeper red. He looks a little like a prince, with a crown of dark curls and overwhelming self-assurance, and Adam feels another step removed from reality.

“’m Ronan,” he says between bites, and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand when he’s finished. “Sure you don’t want a plum?”

Adam is much less sure, in face of the sweet red still dripping down Ronan’s fingertips. One is pushed into his hands anyway, and it feels like a trick, like fairy food, like he won’t ever be able to find his way back home if he eats it. And he does want to go back, eventually; as marvellous as this oasis is, it is not the life he is tearing his fingers open trying to create. He feels very much a human, with unattractive human ambitions.  

So Adam just reminds himself that magic is not real, and eats the fruit. It is all the sweetness of summer he can’t afford in one mouthful. Ronan nods approvingly and says, “Come see the deer,” and it’s not really a suggestion.

The deer are dainty and delicate and bolder than they should be, and Ronan moves among them with an easy grace that Adam is painfully unfamiliar with. His picks fruit off trees they pass and throws them to Adam, refusing to give him the chance to hesitate and do the proper thing and decline. Adam thinks he should save some, or at least not look so obviously hungry as he eats, but he can’t help it; he spoils his skin with fruit juice instead of burst blood cells, reds and purples and oranges running in rivulets down his fingers.

“What’s this called?” he asks, about plants shaped like stars, or like explosions, ones with incandescent fruit or long curls of bitter seeds.

“Beats me,” Ronan says about most, or, “It doesn’t have a name.”

Adam would like to object to that, but it seems almost appropriate. The heat has lent the day a surreal sort of haze, and being guided around a paradise eating fruits that there aren’t names for is a series of events happening to a stranger that also happens to be him. It is only the certainty that it is temporary that makes it bearable at all. And if the deer have three eyes, if they have mottled coats that shift like clouds, Adam can watch with precarious distance without filtering it through logic at all.

There is no one else, all day. Distant voices, occasionally, laughter drifting around the hills, the sounds of machines, music overflowing from the house’s windows, but not one other person ever comes into view. Adam is grateful, because if there was anyone else he’d have to leave, or worse, have to stay. Be invited in for dinner, a longer slice of impossibility, and have to either awkwardly decline or awkwardly suffer assessing, over-privileged stares.

He can only tolerate Ronan because Ronan has stopped staring, and stopped paying him any mind at all beyond guiding him through paddocks and past livestock. If he looks at Adam it is for fractional seconds, and at his eyes and not his cheek, and Adam only notices because he was watching Ronan. They grew up twenty minutes apart, and Ronan is as foreign as he could possibly be.

“You can come back, you know,” Ronan says, when the sky has erupted, orange and pink polluting the clouds. Their circuitous route through the barns has been leading more and more obviously around to a grand iron gate, the bars woven together like scripture. It occurs to Adam how strange it is, that he should be on the inside of it. There are more voices drifting over the hills, and half of them hold Ronan’s name; time for both of them to go. The magic is wearing away with the dirt road in sight, but Ronan keeps talking. “We don’t get a lot of visitors out here, but you’d be welcome. Might be nice.”

“Might be,” Adam tries, but pragmatism is bound to his bones and less than a second later he appends, “But I don’t think I’ll have time.”

“Well, whatever,” Ronan says, hiding his disappointment more clumsily than Adam would have expected. The gate responds to a push from him, clicking like it unlocked without actually seeming to _have_ a lock, and Adam lets the very last drop of magic sit on his tongue before he swallows it. And that’s the end; that’s over. Ronan says, “See you,” and shuts the gate after him, and Adam begins the long walk back to Henrietta.

It’s not further than he can walk, but it’s far enough for his mind to start objecting to the afternoon, to start explaining things away with heat exhaustion and mirages, with stress responses and hallucinations. He gets home before he misses his night shift, and he scrubs a watercolour of syrup off his palms before he starts work, and then the wheels of his life are grinding on as though there was never a break.

 

It’s another year before he starts at Aglionby, and it takes him a very long time to recognise Ronan Lynch. The boy he remembers is not the boy who shaved his head and painted himself in black ink hazard signs, and there is very little that is charming about him now. He is much more human and much more terrible and Adam barely has to think about it before he approaches.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks very much for reading!! I'd like to write something for every day of Pynch week, but I've been sloooow lately so I'll have to see how I go. Feel free to come chat to me on [tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)!


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